In October 2012, the IRS paid an anonymous informant USD38 million for information relating to a fortune 500 company. The information was presented to the IRS through legal counsel. There is speculation that the informant is still working for the company, probably in the taxpayer’s finance/accounting department.

On 1 August 2012, the Whistleblower Office’s new rules became effective in the US. The new rules blatantly encourage employees to “blow the whistle” by submitting a simple one page form, with a convenient “online” tip submission programme and even allows the informant to maintain their confidentiality.

This new reward programme is generating a whistleblowing culture, with hundreds of law firms promoting

services to aid informants. Under the new programme, a mid-level employee of a foreign bank, or offshore trust company can simply provide the IRS information on 50 clients, who, for a few years each had USD4 million of unreported income and can earn up to USD60 million in rewards for his/her efforts. And for a non-US person, they may even receive the award tax-free!

Other Features: Taxation, Regulation, Funds and Fund Administration and Bribery
Politicians with their heads in the clouds

The banks have created a system whereby everyone has to borrow to keep up with the inflation (caused by their lending practices), but there is never enough money in the economy to pay back the debt plus interest. It’s like a board game where every round, one of the players must go bankrupt, and the bank takes their real assets. It’s a great game for the banks, but a fraudulent contract at the root. See “The American Dream” for an excellent and entertaining video on how this all works:

Viewer discretion is advised

This is not a children’s cartoon and deals with themes that may be above the understanding of younger children. The film has some moderately strong language and cartoon violence, which is a shame as it should be shown in Senior/high schools.

It’s not easy being contrary. But it is where profits are often found.

Take Russia, for instance. It’s a market that has been on a downward slope for much of the year as global investors fret about what’s to come with new elections – now that former-President Vladimir Putin is looking for another tour of duty.

That kindles bad memories of iron-fisted Russian premieres of the old Soviet Union.

And just this month, protestors began taking to the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg and clashing with police in the aftermath of questionable parliamentary elections.

It’s in moments like these, when non-economic turmoil upsets markets, that you often find the best opportunities.

Russia is the cheapest of all the so-called BRIC nations today. It’s benefiting from what I call “micro booms” – this one in the consumer and in resources and this micro boom means that 2012 will be a good year for Russian stocks.

I was sitting in a small conference room in Zurich, talking with Alex, the former head of private banking in Moscow for a major Swiss bank. Having spent years living and travelling in Russia, he has a knowledge base of the country as deep as Russia’s winter freeze.

Today, Alex still invests in Russia for ultra-high net worth private clients from his office in Switzerland. I searched him out because I wanted a non-American view of Russia.

It’s very easy for American equity analysts to allow cultural prejudices to color their thinking about Russia, especially because of all we’ve gone through with the Great Bear during the Cold War and beyond.

Indeed, Americans like to cut-and-paste their own Western economic and political values and apply them to the rest of the world. That leads them to miss opportunities, because they’re looking at the country through a distorted lens.

Europeans see Russia from a different perspective. And Alex’s take is that “Russia is cheap.”

Back in my hotel overlooking Lake Zurich, I pulled up a list of major Russian stocks to gauge their valuations and see just how cheap they might actually be. And they are cheap – by any measure … and ridiculously so.

I found gads of stocks with P/E ratios in the low- and mid-single digits. The MSCI Russia index, which tracks the market as whole, is now trading nearly 50% below the 10-year average. That’s the kind of cheap that presumes everything in Russia is headed in the wrong direction … but that’s not the case.

Russia is in a pretty good position, economically. Its economy is deeply reliant on oil, and oil-price movements exert big influence on its stock market. At the moment, there are worries about recession in Europe and whether that flows through America and, ultimately, through oil prices.
but that’s the short-sighted view.
America and Europe are busy increasing their money supply, and oil prices will move higher, relative to the dollar – since the two tend to move in opposite directions. And that, ultimately, is good news for the Russian economy and its stock market.

The OECD have released figures showing that the gap between the poorest section of the population and the richest is the widest for 30 years. This is in fact truer of the countries that are usually considered the most equal, Germany’s top ten percent of earners earned on average eight times the income of the poorest ten percent, this will be held up as another example of why more taxes are necessary on the richer sections of the population when really attention should be given to creating wealth and opportunities within the low earners.
The amount needed to be included in to the top ten percent of earners was broadly the same though out the OECD countries, UK was £55K, Germany €57.3K and $114K in the USA, where as the lowest wage was just £4,700 in the UK this is where action is needed and not more poorly thought out redistribution.
Tax and benefit systems play a major role in reducing market-driven inequality, but have become less effective at redistributing income since the mid-1990s. The main reason lies on the benefits side: benefits levels fell in real terms in nearly all OECD countries, eligibility rules were tightened to constrain spending on social protection, and transfers to the poorest failed to keep pace with earnings growth.
As a result, the benefit system in most countries has become less effective in reducing inequalities over the past 15 years.
Another factor has been a cut in top tax rates for high-earners.
“There is nothing inevitable about high and growing inequalities,” said Mr Gurría. “Our report clearly indicates that up-skilling of the workforce is by far the most powerful instrument to counter rising income inequality. The investment in people must begin in early childhood and be followed through into formal education and work.”

Employment is the most promising way of tackling inequality. The biggest challenge is creating more and better jobs that offer good career prospects and a real chance to people to escape poverty.